Turning Passion into Profit
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Col Needham set up his first business at the age of 14 designing and selling games software for computers. But his real love, since the age of 5, has always been film. Col started logging every movie he'd seen in a paper diary which he eventually set up as a database, along with other like-minded film fans. Although it began and remains a personal passion, IMDB is now a multi million pound business, which was one of Amazon's first acquisitions. Col has remained CEO and founder, and he's now seen 15,000 films - all logged religiously in IMDB. He talks to Evan Davis about the journey from passion to profit.
GUEST Col Needham, CEO and Founder, IMDB
PRESENTER: Evan Davis
PRODUCER: Julie Ball
EDITOR: Simon Watts
SOUND: Graham Puddifoot
PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATORS: Siobhan Reed and Helena Warwick-Cross
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello, welcome to the programme. |
| 0:07.3 | Four letters, IMDB. |
| 0:09.3 | You may recognise them, standing for the internet movie database. |
| 0:13.1 | It's on the web, it's an app, it's for film fans and for Hollywood, |
| 0:17.1 | the industry's knowledge base of every film and every actor and more. |
| 0:21.0 | You can find out who the key grip was in that movie |
| 0:23.6 | or what the best quotes were from the script. |
| 0:26.7 | It's a very big deal in film, but it's also a wonderful story |
| 0:29.8 | and one that starts in the UK. |
| 0:32.5 | And it is that which is our subject today. |
| 0:34.9 | A case of a personal passion turning into profit, |
| 0:38.5 | a business built from a desk in a bedroom and a home computer, |
| 0:41.9 | and that ended up as part of Amazon. There are many business lessons learned on the way. |
| 0:48.2 | Cole Needham is the founder and chief executive of IMDB and is my guest, |
| 0:53.3 | and we can talk about where the company came from, |
| 0:55.5 | what Amazon saw in it, and how it manages its many volunteer contributors. So, Cole, welcome |
| 1:02.9 | to the bottom line. Thank you for joining us. Let's just start with what the business consists |
| 1:07.3 | of at the moment. So how big is it and what are the sort of range of products |
| 1:12.1 | that you've got? So we have, as you very, very eloquently said, we have information on |
| 1:18.6 | every movie, every TV show, from the very earliest experiments in cinema, all the way through |
| 1:25.8 | to kind of like Avatar 5 in 2028. |
... |
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